I take a walk to the park and I follow it down to the creek, the desert, the forest, the river, the lake, the sea, the pollution from industrial waste billowing from factories, and pouring into every water way, radiation unveiling across a barren landscape, a dam blocks salmon runs and destroys ecosystems downstream. I pass clear-cuts long done, the deserts feel hotter littered with mining and oilfields, the forests dryer logged and carved, another wildfire burned a section of forest and opportunistic loggers took what survived, in the desert a mine takes the earth beneath, I take a swim in the sea, the coral reef is bleached. The runoff of industrial civilization hurts my skin.
I can’t find any water that is safe to drink.
I head to dry off in the sun beneath power-pylons, stretches of concrete suffocating the earth as far as the eye can see, skyscrapers, houses, and offices buzzing and pulsing with the luxuries provided by the bass-rhythm of Eco-domination. The wind turbines, solar panels, dams, and nuclear energy rely on mining the earth of rare minerals and expands the infrastructure of an Eco-dominating way of life. The electric power of this infrastructure is a capitalist good, while simultaneously expanding extraction, consumer goods, surveillance, military tech, societal control, policing, prisons… my head buzzes.
It turns night and I head off to rest.
I build a fire and I realize I cannot see the stars. They are blocked by the light of a million lights. I watch the trains passing from the top of a tree. Every 3rd train is carrying oil, every single one is another capitalist good, ever so often there is military equipment.
The goods from these trains are loaded onto trucks and propelled across the highways, or put onto ships or planes for their destinations.
I think about how climate collapse doesn’t have to be measured by the instruments that only those in domination possess, it is clear that the ecosystems are collapsing and have collapsed or murdered to the rhythm of industrial technological domination.
My head reels, I sit down for a moment, in the distance I see prisons, jails, police flutter around like flies to a carcass, the cops murdering the 100th person this year is in the newspapers in the boxes on the street. I see a monument to colonialism, history of indigenous genocide, the plantation scars of slavery, cars with white supremacist bumper stickers pass me. I hitch a ride with the next friendly looking face, we pass the southern border wall and I stare off into the distance thinking of everyone who has been forced to die crossing, and people forced into concentration camps.
The driver says that another trans kid died the other day, the driver misgenders her and I never learn her real name. I think about how often this happens, and how it doesn’t really matter if it was a hate-crime murder, or due to the suffocating environment of the violent imposition of gender, or a tortured life of maladjustability, they’re the same cause of death: this gendered nightmare.
Throughout all this I fall into daydreams of planes falling out the sky into buildings, nuclear reactors melting down, trains crashing and exploding in the yard, a blackout, electrical substations overloading, a checkpoint on fire, a precinct explodes, an oilfield burns, a billion dead government employees, politicians heads exploding, CEO’s trapped dying in a house fire, a bridge collapsing, a nazi bleeds out in the street, I watch the life leave a transphobes eyes, dams falling beneath their own weight, a ship capsizing, a fascist meeting is barricaded from the outside and everyone burned alive, a car filled with explosive is driven into an active session of congress.
I purge these daydreams with what I am capable of expressing.
Do you feel yourself in the misery of an authoritarian world of domination, only escaping with daydreams of violence?
If not, be honest with me, upfront, because I am hopeless, bitter, angry. I’m not interested in positivity.
I want to be free, I want authority and domination to feel pain, fear, to recede.
I want this world to receive blows at the hand of an anarchist insurgent force.
I want to enact revenge, vengeance. I want to strike at authority and domination.
I want to be arm in arm engaged in destroying the world that we live in.
I’m nauseous of the positivity. I’m disgusted with the hope. I find despair in those who find comfort.
“Many argue that those who have no hope to convey should keep quiet. Although this would explain the silence into which many of us are sliding, we don’t agree. In fact, in a way we think exactly the opposite: those who should shut up are the ones who persist in peddling enchanting narratives (from heavenly paradise as a reward for earthly resignation to communism as the ineluctable outcome of capitalist development, passing through the insurrection that comes with every citizens’ mobilisation or street riot). Especially now – with humanity well on the way to extinction, a planet on the verge of ecological collapse, a social massacre that gets worse every day, a war that brandishes nuclear weapons, voluntary servitude so generalised as to make any aspiration to even the slightest freedom ridiculous – it seems to us more urgent and essential than ever to look deeply into reality and not to skim the surface of things in order to draw comforting illusions from it.
[…]
«If the Sinopes condemned me to exile, I condemn them to stay in their homeland!” Diogenes the Cynic is said to have said. Art of putting on a good face or furious philosophy of life? Beloved comrades, we too are condemned to exile, to perpetual exile since there is no longer any place for us in this world.
One dream after another, one desire after another, one freedom after another, everything is being snatched away from us. And the knowledge that the extinction of the lovers of freedom will only just precede that of the advocates of authority is not much consolation to us. But here, in the midst of loneliness and despair, there is not only despondency, bitterness, melancholy, nausea. Here there is also what is called the courage of despair, that determination to try everything because one has nothing left to lose.
Let us find this courage. Let us condemn the domesticated bipeds to stay in their homeland, without wasting any more time chasing their parties, their classes, their movements. Let us enrich the ways of exile. Let us prepare to face solitude. Let us train ourselves to survive in the desert, to move in the desert, to fight in the desert. Without any more qualms, without any more pity. By furious philosophy of life, by vengeful philosophy of life.
Death, life lies in waiting.”From Act For Freedom Now!
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